


Shadows in Dark Corners

by Cluegirl



Series: Scatterlings and Orphans [7]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-24 05:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/630868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>None of them were prepared to watch Captain America fall apart in the face of a flashback nightmare, Natasha less so than any.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadows in Dark Corners

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet was requested by [ Paperdollkisses](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paperdollkisses/pseuds/paperdollkisses), who said _I would LOVE to know what (Natasha) did after Steve had his PTSD dream in the common room once Thor led Steve away._
> 
> And so here it is! This ficlet slots into [_Never Have I Ever_ ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/493421)between the end of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2. It is also un-betaed. All mistakes herein, canonical, grammatical, and/or political, are mine, they are mine, they are beautiful, and they are mine!

"For I know," Thor says, "how cruel the dreams of reaching can be."

And in the shocked silence that follows, Natasha finds herself thinking, "I don't." It is an uncomfortable thought in an uncomfortable moment, but she is well versed in keeping such things from showing unless it serves her to seem vulnerable. There is no such service to be had here, only a strange sort of twist in her belly as she watches one golden giant of a man gently lead the other shivering away. 

It strikes her, absurdly, that gentle is not a word she'd have ascribed to Thor before this. She ought to have known better, because the big ones go one of two ways, historically, and Thor is not the brutish type. But it still surprises her to note the way Thor's grip on Steve's shoulders is easy, steady and soothing, how he uses his own body to shelter the weeping man from the view of his team, and how his own eyes are bright and wounded with memory as they pass out of sight. 

The Asgardian is the only one of them unashamed of his reaction to the Captain's nightmare; Clint looks as jumpy and anxious as if he were awaiting a mission debrief in a room full of bees. Banner is awkward and protective, still holding to Stark's arm while he struggles to shove his horrified sympathy into clinical terms, and Stark... well, he looks two steps from either hysteria or shaking collapse. There's a part of her brain, buried beneath the lockdown, that's wondering which it will be, and whether Stark will be able to resist the urge to make all of this – Steve's nightmare, the uncomfortable scene, the awkward intimacy of Thor's intervention – somehow about himself.

"Well then," he smashes the silence with a grin too bright, too loud by half. "Anybody else need a drink?" 

And Natasha, feeling keenly the value of that deflection, answers, "Vodka neat please," and moves to reclaim her place on the sofa. She passes too close to Clint in his jumpy state, and cuts him a warning glance when he flinches, telling him, in their wordless language to either pull it together, or name his drink and get to falling properly apart before he winds up hurting someone. 

He swallows, takes a deep breath, and then calls, "Jagermeister for me," and flops sideways over the arm of the sofa, so that his head wedges bruising-hard against her ribs. She doesn't flinch. Clint's good practice at soaking little hurts, and she gives as good as she gets from him – usually when he's forgotten he's got it coming. This one goes into the ledger. For now, she loops her arm gently across his shoulders, and waits for Stark to quit critiquing Clint's admittedly sophomoric taste in alcohol, and get around to serving it. And if her heart is running faster than usual, and if her stomach is a knot of unusual energy, and if her throat is tight with something that isn't quite memory, and if her fingers are tingling with something that isn't exactly tension as she waits, then nobody need know it but her.

***

The drinking doesn't last long, just a few hard rounds, shot after shot, quickly, recklessly while they pointedly do not discuss anything of merit, importance or significance. Even Bruce partakes without complaint, knocking back expensive tequila without a wince. Natasha hopes he's a mellow drunk, not a mean one, then she discards the notion as irrelevant – they are not drinking for companionship here. This is penance, plain and simple; the scourging of spirits to batter away the stink of helplessness from each of them. It will last only until the buzz begins, and the masks begin to slip.

"I mean, we've all had them, right?" Bruce says, and Natasha begins the countdown in her head. "Nightmares, I mean?"

Stark's mouth gives an ugly twist, but he hoists his too-full tumbler of bourbon in silent agreement. Clint grimaces, draped inverted and boneless over the sofa now that she's shoved him off her side, and reaches for the bottle to join the toast. He doesn't spill a drop. 

Natasha does not drink. It feels dishonest to do so, and she has had, she finds when Bruce glances at her a moment too long, just enough vodka have misjudged her company. Not that she didn't think he'd notice, but that she didn't think him tipsy enough to comment on it.

"You didn't drink." He says it in perhaps the only way he can; deferential, gentle, soft with sympathy. Natasha wonders if that is his default setting, or if it only surfaces from his dispassion when he's around the broken ones.

She shrugs. "I don't. Dream."

That gets Stark's attention. "Bullshit," he calls, leveling a finger her way. "Psycho you may be, but there's only so long humans can go without REM sleep before they start hallucinating. And no, this is not theoretical knowledge, either."

She shrugs again, refusing to ask after his final point. "Then I don't remember my dreams." 

It isn't even a lie. She doesn't remember her dreams, even when she wakes with a pounding heart and a knife in her fist, or when she wakes with her cheeks wet and her nose clogged, or when she wakes with her sex throbbing and slick. She cannot think of a time when she did. It's a shabby little grace to lay at the feet of the Red Room's procedures, but at least it's something. 

The others fall into a silence at once nervous, envious, and shamefaced as she tosses back her shot then pushes out of the sofa in a single, fluid movement that ends in her dropping the shot glass over the open mouth of the vodka bottle. It's time for her to go. The conversation is dead, the comfort and companionship curdled on the edge of her tongue as usual, and the vodka was getting warm anyway. 

" _Good night,_ " she tells them as she glides to the elevator, each movement calculated to distract any watchers from the buzz of alcohol in her blood.

None reply, and it is not until the elevator doors close behind her that Natasha realizes this is because she'd said it in Russian.

***

She spends ten minutes in her rooms, sitting on the end of her bed, staring at and not seeing the clock while waiting for the lurching sensation of a long fall to ease out of her belly. Her heartbeat is not yet back to normal, the strange tension in her hands is beginning to ache, and the sound of Steve's weeping, stifled to a wheezy, staccatto sort of hiss behind his hands, circles in her mind like a swarm.

In her world, the world of liars, cheats, murderers and thieves, grief has never been honest. Natasha cannot recall once having witnessed tears without reading at least three other motivations behind the display. This is the first time where she can find none -- no secondary benefit to the Captain revealing that bleeding wound to them all, no angle or spin to be had, no manipulation, however subtle, to be seen, and it fascinates her.

Because she does not believe in simple things. She has never had that luxury, and yet no matter how she turns the situation, Natasha can find nothing to it but what it seemed to be; grief unexpressed and loss kept silent, the both grown too great to contain, too heavy to conceal, too obvious to deny once Steve's sleeping mind and Stark's bumbling intervention startled it out into the light. It fascinates her, this pure, rarified grief; it frightens her just a little, and were she to lay back and close her eyes, Natasha knows it would haunt away all trace of sleep for her, no matter how long she might lie still and pretend. A smell she can't identify, a tune on the edge of hearing, a flicker of movement she will never turn her head quick enough to spot. 

The numbers of the clock flash to 1:36, and she lets out a sigh. She will not catch it here, that elusive, teasing something, not even drunkenness or exhaustion would lure it close enough to this quiet darkness of hers that she could catch it, wrestle it down and look her fill. She must track it to its source.

Breaking into Steve's apartment is no effort at all. She'd memorized his access codes within a week once he'd finally moved to the Tower, and the man is too trusting to change them lacking any direct evidence of compromise. She will leave him none to find, though it's possible Jarvis will tell him she's been... assuming Jarvis allows her entry at all, that is. His processes are just human enough to sometimes elude her prediction, and sometimes Natasha finds this challenge welcome. Tonight it is not.

However when she types out 35-276-909 on the keypad, the AI holds his peace, slides back the door, and brings the lights inside the apartment up about 20%. It's more than enough light to navigate the rooms, especially given the state of them; Steve's apartment is tidy and clean, his belongings neatly stacked, ordered, and squared away, ready for snap inspection at any time. She passes the drafting table, where a lone sketchbook sits open, defiantly angled against the green rubber pad beneath it, a mechanical pen and plastic eraser crammed down the throat of the spiral binding. She traces the edge of the book, amused at the seemingly symbolic non linear effect, then blinks at what the image shows. 

The face Steve has drawn on the page is certainly nightmarish; peeled of skin and hair, flesh glistening darkly as the face, little more than a skull with hateful eyes, screams and screams, but it is not the sort of image one clings to in sleep, nor weeps, upon waking, to find he has lost. Whatever the importance of this grisly face, it isn't what she's come here looking for.

She resists the urge to examine the other pages, recognizing it for the diversion tactic it is. What she has come seeking, she won't find in any book, not even one in which Steven Rogers has written and painted every page. That broken sound he made; the cracking pain in his eyes when she caught his face in her hands and pulled him up from his shielding huddle around Stark; the way the breath scraped out of him like a living, struggling thing -- these were not matters that fit into word or line or angle or shade. These were things beyond the telling or the showing -- not even the Red Room's best efforts had managed such enormity within her, and having seen it now, Natasha doubted she had ever come close to portraying it even in her 'best' work.

That would be why it unnerves her, no doubt. An emotional resonance she could not recreate upon demand would once have led to a long, cold spot in her memory, and a set of skills for which she could never quite account, with which she would never quite be comfortable.

She lets her footsteps carry her to his bedroom, just as neat as the rest of the apartment; a desperate order imposed on the chaos of the modern life into which he'd been dropped. She smiles; were Steve a woman, she'd have sought this illusion of control by changing her hairstyle every week. The neatness, by contrast, seems a bit more benign. His pajamas are folded atop his pillow. She strokes a finger along the pale cotton, considering. Her stomach gives that falling lurch again, and she snatches her finger back as if stung. The annoyance clenches down immediately, and Natasha gives it a whispered curse as she snatches her own shirt off over her head and flings it at the wall. It slaps across a framed photograph, then tumbles to the blond hardwood floor in a defiantly untidy slump.

She scrapes her pants off and throws them to sprawl beside the bathroom, her panties flung the other way, so they block the hallway door like a splash of blood. No hiding behind polite smiles and distant eyes now; no measured steps to hide how deep and messy this wound must be. Steve's pajamas hang on her like a joke, but the cotton is smooth and worn soft, and there's something tight and hard within her that uncoils to feel it warming against her skin, smoothed in long strokes beneath her hands. It smells of skin rather than of soap, and she smiles to imagine him folding the pajamas every morning before he leaves the tower to run the courses of the city.

Then she bends down and yanks loose the precise corners of his bedding, musses the drum-taut, quarter-bouncing illusion into a welter of loose flapping softness. The weight of his bedding is heavy and quick to warm, redolent and unguarded with the sleepy scent of skin as she slips between his sheets and settles to stillness.

And thinks what it must be like to feel such loss. Thinks how it would be to have had someone steadfast, comforting, and protective when she'd been young; someone who might have tried to teach her ways to keep safe, to make the best of helpless situations, and how to pick herself up again when she'd fallen. Someone who looked... oh, she's seen the photos, and so Seargent Barnes' face will do as well as any -- someone with wry grey eyes and a quick, sharp grin that spoke volumes in silence, but would be understood by nobody but her. A secret language of years' knowing, decades of silent adoration because one didn't speak such words as love and need and forever to someone who knew you as deeply as breathing, did one? Either they knew you loved them -- if you loved them, and from the way he'd shattered, there was no question of it – or they could never see it, and either way what use words? What use names for things that could fade between bullet and needle, tank and chamber? What use names for anything? Let her be Vasilisa to him, let him be Lucky Ivan to her, but let him only be, for just a twisted little fiction in this borrowed darkness, hers.

She could almost imagine it; grey eyes that would know her, understand her, and accept, if not return, what parody of love she might give him. Trust, loyalty, inasmuch as such a thing could have existed in that part of her life, but the point... she grips the edge of the blanket, feeling her throat twist up tight and hard, the point is to imagine that such a thing, such a person _could_ have existed in her life.

That she _could_ have loved him to the deepest, still-private shred of herself... and that she could have lost him too. Her eyes are wet, swimming with heat she does not let herself blink away. 

How might it have been to stand, out of reach, helpless to interfere while her Ivan fell and fell and fell forever? How might the failure, the betrayal of her body, the failure of her will, resourcefulness, cleverness, bloody minded stubbornness to overcome the simplest, weakest of physical laws, have wounded her? How might her throat have seized and choked on icy air, her hands gripping only empty air as winter and altitude ripped him, her secret heart, away?

She choked, felt it all the way to her navel, and had to drag air into her lungs past the wet, throbbing knot in her throat. Heat streaked her face, and the hard-won breath only made her shake beneath the blankets, as if a great hand squeezed her ribs from behind, curled her around herself and pressed her empty again in a shuddering wheeze. A quiet, ugly sound that made her neck ache and her knees draw up tight. She wrapped her arms tight around them, and pressed her leaking eyes to the warm, soft cotton.

How might it have been... how might it have been to never show the gaping wound where that heart had stopped beating? To have bitten hard at your duty, asking only that it let you one chance to follow after when you'd won... only to wake, so far from the grasp of merry grey eyes and biting white wit that no one alive save you even knew he had lived, or that you had loved him? How lost, how desperate... how lonely that must feel. 

Another noise escaped her, low and ragged, muffled by the blankets. If it sounded somewhat like a name, well no worry. Everyone knew Lucky Ivan was no more than a fairy tale. And Vasilisa might have been brave, but she was no Marya Morevna, no wily witch to chain the Deathless her cellar, and rescue the tale from Lucky Ivan's turn as the jealous fool. 

She had saved no one but herself, and left the red, beating heart of her behind to wither in winter's cold. And it must have felt like this, somewhat, this wrenching, groaning release of sound and force and bodily humors. This abstract, awful madness that shook her like teeth in an empty, grinning skull. Grief, pure and unflavored must taste something like this; like blood, gunpowder and strong black tea; like snow, smog and rust; like cigarettes, salt, and vodka on someone else's tongue.

Grief must feel something like this. And that would explain why a soul would hide it so deep, so hard beneath patterns and habits and courtesies... because letting it go felt a bit like dying, as if once it had fought its way clear of the empty hollow in your breast where it has lived since the day your heart fell out, it might go and go forever until you were white, cold, and empty.

Or worse, that you might lose some of Him to the release. That in this shaking, howling remembrance, you might somehow, just a little, forget. And oh, she had forgotten so very much already... All she could do was cling to the fantasy she'd borrowed from her Captain's misery, to choke her way through the horrid fiction that felt bigger, as it struggled out of her, than she had ever been inside; to try and recall something more real than an old, long dead New Yorker's laughing grey eyes in a puckish trickster's face – to remember someone who could have known her true, nameless self once, before a long, long fall.

***

Jarvis monitored the situation until the agent's biodata indicated she had fallen asleep. Only then did he lower the lights throughout the Captain's apartment, set the locks fast shut, and slid the blinds silently shut over the view that would blaze with dawn in only a few hours. For awhile, the rhythm of her breath hitched, even asleep, as if with tiny, seismic aftershocks, but eventually the breathing, clogged as it was, leveled out.

He stopped the feed when her eyes began to flicker and dart beneath their lids, her soft, streaked face curving, tentatively, into a smile at whatever she was dreaming.

In a few hours she would doubtless be gone, returned to her own chambers, leaving the Captain's exactly as she had found it. For now, though, Jarvis was content to provide for her the comfort of this little privacy.

It was the least he felt he could do.


End file.
